More Rambling

So here it is another Friday and time for me to ramble again.  I did just receive my welcome package to the Hopman Academy, one month from ten days of intense tennis.  Personally I think I am 10 years and 15lbs from really intense training but hey there is a month t work on the lbs at least.  There was alot of speculation yesterday on th whole Microsoft purchase of Doubleclick, but really 2 billion.  Its a nice sum if they can get it but most feel its way too high of an asking price.  Also Microsoft should look into beating Google in other ways than buying companies that are just mediocre.  I mean its been years since Doubleclick did much of anything. Yahoo on the other hand has been great at developing new stuff, just they cant seem to be able to budge from their position in the market.  Microsoft would be betterif it through a few million to that developer group and stole them.  Dell is trying to get our Microsoft Lic business, did I ever mention how much I hate Dell?  Well, they suck.  They are cheap and that is about the only good thing I can say.  Their customer service sucks, and they produce an inferior product, did I mention their customer service sucks?  They have some strange relationships with companies like EMC, great stuff.  But you have to use Dell customer service if you buy it through them.  So like everyone else I just buy direct from EMC.  Apple announced the Iphone release will be June 11th.  I have seen the Iphone, nice idea good start, but just try to text on it.  I see a market just nothing that deserves this type of hype.  Business cant use it, cant do email or at least effectively…kids will want a phone they can text message on under a desk and on the Iphone you cant feel the keys.  So yeah it will sell upfront cause its new and kool but long term it needs alot of work.  I saw Arrington cover Scrapblog today.  Very kool stuff I will hop on and play more over the weekend and tell you what I think.  He also covers the Myspace John McCain mess.  I am not a McCain fan but this wont hurt him and is real funny.  Hey do stupid things you get what you deserve.  Some Altiris engineers are in today to show us how their piece of crap waste of money works, yippeee!!!  Did I give away how I feel about his piece of crap waste of money??  Anyhow enough rambling from me, enjoy the day and no I am not jumping on the Sanjaya bandwagon, but again it is funny!!

Silly Corporate Games

So yesterday was meeting day, as is every Wednesday.  It was time once again for silly corporate games.  Pseudotech Exec is still trying to make heads or tails of MS licesning.  In my opinion he will punt on this shortly and it will fall on the lap of someone else.  Then of course he will present it as his own work, as has been the protocol to date.  Then we had an interesting one.  A new Director on one of his first projects, completely fabricated tests that were done and made up results.  Numbnuts made this presentation in from of the CIO, with me in the room. Now I am only the guy who has to validate the test results, so imagine my surprise when he told everyone the tests were run and I approved them.  I am so pissed now about this.  I should have call him on it in front of everyone but I must be getting soft cause I gave him 2 days to rerun everything and actually get it approved, before I would bring up this “gaff”.  You see that is my rambling today.  Corporate technology is not really about the technology itself but about the politics around it.  My theory on why is basically this.  A CEO who hires a CIO knows nothing about technology so its all on presentation and feel not so much substance.  So now the CIO hired who is likely a real good politician and has questionable tech skills goes out and hires more political lackeys and so on.  It then creates a culture of ass kissing and politics rather than one of true efficiency and innovation.   How does one solve this hmm good question, I think realizing it is a problem is the first step.  Past that maybe look more towards results then who you’d rather lunch with .

 Ok enough on that two things I did want to mention today.  I saw the the whole Kathy Sierra mess and while I agree those things should not have been posted, but it has definitely been blown out of proportion.  I really do respect Scoble  and so I wont knock him for his week of silence, but I will miss his postings and cannot wait til his return on Monday.  Secondly I want to mention the Bluelines blog has adopted comments, although from a blog that says it has 22,000 hits a day there are very few comments and they all sound extremely filtered.  I urge them to let people post freely and yes you will get negative comments but so what at least if they post them on your site you can reply.  It will build a better relationship with your reader base I assure you.

The Ills of Corporate America

I have been thinking on the train back and forth into the concrete jungle about what I am going to write on my next post.  So today’s ramble is on what I think are the ills of corporate America.  Simple its Americans.  We are a greedy, selfish, gluttonous society.  We are all about what is best for us and oh how short sighted is this view.  Look at middle management in the corporate world.  They are all about promotion and does one get promoted by being efficient and shrinking costs, not if those costs are FTE’s.  No one in middle management wants to bring in a tool, or develop one, that would decrease their staff from 10 to 5.  Even though for the corporate bottom line it may be the best thing to do.  This is because the feeling in middle management is that if you oversee less people you are less valuable.  Middle management seems also to be about leveling the playing field.  We introduce so much process and checks for the stupid that we handcuff the truely innovative.  There must be a better balance, or as I would prefer the Jack Welch method, rid yourself of stupid.  I guess you can see that I am definitely a proponent of ridding yourself of the bottom 10% every year.  I find that this not only rids you of deadwood, but is a great motivator for those who may need a kick in the can every once and a while.  I am not saying that a company should be without process but it needs to be a bit more pliable and not so rigid.  Let people excel, give them opportunity upon opportunity, and if they never seem to achieve even mediocrity, cut them loose. 

Also promote and reward middle management based on truly effecting the corporate bottom line.  Hey folks without that you and your 10 subordinates will be without a place to go everyday.  I think it was Jack Stack who wrote that every employee needs to have a stake in the bottom line.  We should all understand how our actions, or lack thereof, effect the bottom line.  This would promote innovation and peer pressure would create an atmosphere that the slackers would not appreciate.

So that is today’s ramble, not truly a doctrine of corporate America but that is why I only ramble

Decline of current Media

There has been a ton of stuff written on the decline of the print media.  I work for a media company and have some great insight as to why these media giants will fall one by one.  The current focus on the decline of print is focused on dailies, ie newspapers.  What everyone fails to see is the coming decline of the monthlies and quarterlies.  This print magazine world is headed down the same path as the dailies.  I also suspect they are less prepared to make the necessary tact to stay afloat.  Why do I say this easy, its all about current power and greed.  The folks who run these companies are old entrenched veterans who fear change.  They see the Internet through the same lens that they view startup mags, the majority of which fail.  They all have their big Westchester and Greenwich homes all purchased from the booty of the printed mag and they know nothing but.  Look at Martha Stewart.  We have 5 magazines and no original web content.  Anything you find on the web you can get right from the magazines.  This tells me that the powers that be here are still thinking print first and the web just as print support.  They do not embrace the blog community, heck their “blog” over at Blueprint is just a bunch of editors posting articles.  They are afraid of ugc and anythingthey cannot completely control, their heads are stuck in the sand.  It wont be until media companies start producing web first content that they will see the trends and how there is this untapped potential.  I read an article today on Rachel Ray’s new magazine and they are thrilled to have 850k subscribers.  850k subscribers is a success??  Google’s use of pay per action may be the type of program that can build a base of Internet based “subscribers” and at a much much lower overhead.  But really I ramble….

Weekend Fun

So friday night was poker night, and it was the first in a while I did not win something.  I was the second out, played well but sometimes folks just get cards.  Also I have finalized my tennis trip.  10 wonderful days at Hopman in Tampa.  Anyone who has been let me know what to expect. I need to get in better shape cause even the teenis online reviews says this is pretty strenuous.  Boy do I miss those days 20 yrs old could run all day every day.  Psuedotech Exec seems to have not found a hobby yet so i was read a SOX narrative late friday..lol what a waste of time.  Just seems to be the standards in the corporate world and cesspools the biggest chunks always rise to the top.  Next week seems like sos, but hey they still send the paychecks so I will sit around and do nothing all day since that is the pace they seem to be happy with.

OLAP Cubes

Went to an MS demonstration of OLAP cubes with excel,very cool stuff and I can see how coupling this with excel will help in getting users buy in with this.  Has alot of features, at least I thought so that you would normally see in like a Crystal reports type of app.  Also still in the progress of moving off Notes to Exchange, cant wait for this to be done.  With all the flaws of Microsoft, I must say Notes sucks.  I mean not bad really sucks.  Plus the cost for Notes Admins, is tremendous.  I guess they need to get theirs while they can, and they all have that consultant quick hit type of attitude.  Does my disdain for consultants in general come through? Booked my trip to a tennis camp today, spending the first two weeks of May at Saddlebrook, Hopman Academy, in Fla.  Cant wait to go and just relax.  I also saw some good video on Scobles site on some MS techfest.  Doing some neat stuff with 3d cameras, cant pretend to know how the infra red depth stuff works but it is kool.  Now lets see if there becomes a market ofr it besides games.  Well that is all for now going to go program some widgets for my Chumby…got a demo Chumby I think this may be big now just to get pseudotechs excited…ah ye with little vision  lol

Little known VoIP lessons

Well today is just another day in corporate land.  Doing a VoIP project and today was a meeting with a psuedotech exec.  We all know the types nod like they understand everything and then ask the most inane questions.  This guy actually had the gaul to say he knew the difference in codecs but not how many channels are on a T1.  Basically a waste of time, but we all do what we have too.  I saw also that Adobe has released Apollo and I cant wait to play around and see what I can do with it.  The ability to merge the pc and the net , the possibilities?  I had the chance to play with Yahoo Pipes for a while, was ok very imature right now but can be some good things soon coming.  That is of course if Yahoo can keep anyone there for any period of time, I saw they lost another exec to a media company with the latest scoop going to Scripps.  Tomorrow a meeting with Microsoft with the same psuedotech exec, cant wait to see how he deals with licensing from MS…lol..nothing like the straightforward programs from MS to give anyone a headache.  Well I am glad I got this post in today and now its off to watch 2 n 1/2 men and tht Spade comedy that follows it…cant be totally void of inane TV

First Post

I have been icthing to do my own blog for a while, and was always caught up on what to write.  Being an IT executive I thought I would share some insight and experience into the differences between my geek side and the corporate side which pays the bills.  I am always frustrated with the folks who just step in shit.  These guys and we all know who they are, couldnt tell you the difference between bits and bytes, yet control million dollar tech budgets.  I have always been fond of Robert Scoble, Om Malik, Mike Arrington and others who have done such a great job blogging away and I can only hope to bring to light some other insights.

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